Scenario Girl

Ask the user

A couple of months ago I was asked to conduct some user research on the Australian IT website. The primary user profile for the evaluation was identified as blind users who accessed the web with screen reading software, and preferably included some users who were regular readers of The Australian or The Australian IT.

Recruitment was a cinch but the part about finding blind users who read The Australian IT wasn’t. Now it was just an educated guess at first, but given the state of the site up until that point, it was pretty unlikely that content was presented in a usable format for blind readers. So it was no real surprise that I wasn’t able to find anyone who read it via a screen reader.

The back story

To put this all in context though, up until very recently there really haven’t been many news sites that publish content in an accessible manner. SMH was probably the first to do so in Australia, but recently News Digital Media has stepped up and taken first place in providing online news content with a real focus on user experience.

Even so, the nature of news sites is such that they’re often crammed with content sections on the first and second levels of the site. Even sites built with a focus on usability, accessibility and semantics can end up with pages that are cumbersome and slow to navigate.

You see, while headings and lists can greatly enhance page navigation, an over use can quickly diminish any real value they may offer. This is because users of screen readers often scan a page via an alphabetic list of page headings or link labels. Ideally each will have a unique name, but even when they do, long lists become tiresome to read.

But back to my point, I digress.

RSS to the RSScue

An interesting comment was made by two of the four participants during the evaluation I was running on the Aus IT site: the SMH offers a text only version of the site, which the Aus IT does not. While one of the participants chose not to use it, the other loved it. The only draw back she mentioned was that it was impossible to respond to the Letters section of the site in the text version, which could have been solved with a simple hyperlink.

It was right about then I started thinking more about using RSS to enhance the accessibility of site content.

If users are able to easily select a feed for their favourite sections of a news site (or any other information site), will that enhance their interaction with the site as well as improve overall access to information? The beauty of RSS aggregators is that they list articles chronologically and retain any hyperlinks that exist within an article (unlike the text version of the SMH). It’s also very easy to create them for any number of site sections and many sites these days even offer a categorised page listing of site feeds.

More Research

So having given this a bit more thought, I decided to conduct some user research specifically around the use of RSS by blind users. The sort of general information I’m looking for relates to:

• Whether or not blind web users are aware of RSS and know how it’s used.
• The number of blind users who are already using RSS to access and read web content.
• Whether RSS improves access to web content for blind users.
• What the preferred RSS aggregators are for blind users and which offer greater accessibility overall.

I expect to have some more solid information over the next couple of weeks, which I’ll write up here. I think it’s going to be really interesting and I’m particularly keen to see how this might effect the consumption of news online. I also wonder if it might just be a matter of promoting RSS aggregators as an alternative option to accessing content like this.

Whatever the case, it’s always far more interesting to find out directly from the users… so I’ll keep you posted.

Mandatory User Experience Guidelines for NSW Government Websites

Well ok, they’re not mandatory for sites designed for children or young people under 18. So if that isn’t you, then you’re one of the 650+ NSW government websites that either has to tow the line or apply for an exemption.

According to Dana Anspal of the Government Chief Information Office (GCIO), there have only been two exemptions allowed to date: one for the Art Gallery of NSW and the other for the Australian Museum. But before you start thinking of a way around the rules, exemptions will only be approved in limited circumstances and are assessed on a case by case basis.

The ‘guidelines’ are more accurately referred to as the NSW Government Website Style Directive, a document “intended to create a consistent and user-friendly experience by standardising key elements to assist the public in getting the information they need fast”, which the GCIO also hopes will help ensure compliance with the DDA , FOI and Copyright acts.

In essence, the Style Directive will create a single portal for NSW government websites that allows, as Anspal explained, “people to go to one place to get consistent information [in] a single cohesive location”… “the style directive is just one part of a much bigger picture”.

I’m in no way suggesting that the Style Directive is pointless and this certainly isn’t a post on how to apply for an exemption. But I do question the need for a set of mandatory, predefined design guidelines such as these.

The Style Directive is a relatively simple document to follow. Broken into two main sections, it covers navigation and page layout, both of which are further divided into more detailed sections. However, surprisingly it’s presented as a PDF, which seems peculiar given that PDF’s cause significant accessibility issues for many users and there is no alternative content provided. This is the case with a number of supporting documents on the site, too.

The navigation section (I’d link to it but it’s in a PDF!) covers topics such as the ‘L shape Navigation Model’, ‘Navigation Items’, and ‘Navigation Behaviour’. It’s written in a very accessible style (no pun intended), and I imagine it would be quite useful for someone with just a little bit of web knowledge. It’s certainly a ‘no brainer’ for most standards developers.

Information on page layout is divided into six areas, each of which represents a section of the page. For example, the design and layout of the ‘Top Banner’, ‘Tool Bar’, ‘Left Panel’, ‘Right Panel’, Footer and Content sections are all prescribed here.

While the Style Directive will definitely offer a great deal of guidance for some government agencies, it seems to me the only thing that many of the sites will have in common is that they’re ‘government’ websites. Which reminds me of a comment I’ve often heard while conducting user testing on government sites…”it’s not all that exciting but I guess it is a government website”. So I suppose if nothing else, these guidelines will help to really solidify that viewpoint.

On the upside, the [pdf] Style Directive now requires compliance with the WCAG 1 Priority 1 and 2 checkpoints. Until now, government departments have referred to the AGIMO (The Australian Government Information Management Office) web publishing guidelines, which required Priority 1, but only ‘recommended’ compliance with Priority 2 checkpoints.

Overall, the GCIO website provides a good amount of support information and guidance, including HTML templates and CSS that were developed by Gruden. There are also Technical Implementation Notes and a good little eight-pager on Information Architecture and Interaction Design.

Again, most of these supporting documents are PDF’s or word documents.

State of Play Today

At a recent presentation for WIPA (Web Industry Professionals Association) Dana Anspal commented that there have already been “a lot of extensions given to NSW Government Agencies”. With over 650 NSW government websites, only four sites have reported compliance to the GCIO, although apparently there has yet to be any official sign-off on the sites. The four sites mentioned were:

• The State Revenue Office
• The Food Authority
• NSW Fire Brigades
• The Board of Studies, Aboriginal Educational Contents

While the June 30 compliance deadline was considered ambitious, GCIO is confident that there are a number of compliant sites that have yet to report back and that many more sites would comply with the directive over the next twelve months. However, the low number of ‘compliant’ sites is not all that surprising given the rather compressed timeframe government agencies have had to work within:

• October 2006: Style Directive endorsed by the Chief Executive Committee
• February 2007: Circular detailing requirements of Style Directive issued by NSW Premiers Department
• March 2007: Web policy committee formed to assess compliance of submitted sites
• June 30, 2007: All NSW Government websites to demonstrate compliance with the Style Directive

For More Information on the NSW Government Style Directive…

Have a read of the [pdf] NSW Government Style Directive document first. Other supporting documents, including explanatory notes on the Directive, HTML templates, Information Architecture guidelines and a Checklist can all be found on the Style Directive Guidance page, which is a really good collection of relevant, useful resources.

In fact, you might find some of the resources useful even if you aren’t working on a NSW Government Site…